About Me

Manu Sharma New Delhi / Gurgaon, India

Since mid 2006 I have grappled with climate change and what it means for us. As an activist and campaigner, I sought to learn and simultaneously, attempted to influence the issues surrounding it - in technology and policy advocacy. As a consultant, I studied markets and created portfolios in sustainability services and renewable energy investment.

After thousands of hours of research, tenacious activism, working up-close with NGOs as well as the industry, delivering about two dozen public talks, countless conferences, hundreds of online discussions, a few media appearances (including Reuters, News Television, and BBC radio), and continuous evolution of my own ideas about what ought to be done - I may have found some answers but the issue remains far from being addressed.

In the despair filled world of climate change the only place I've found real and lasting hope is in a beautiful vision inspired by "The Ringing Cedars of Russia" book series by Vladimir Megre. The books have triggered a transition movement in Russia and have profoundly influenced me. I am now working towards the vision.

Climate Revolution Initiative, an RTI campaign I founded and ran for a few years is now retired. I no longer deliver talks. I still consider myself an activist though and occasionally post on Green-India group started over nine years ago.

Older entries in this blog relate to my former occupation in user experience design; long time interest in business innovation, strategy, ethics; and venture creation.

Image on top of this bar is courtesy book covers of The Ringing Cedars series published under Croatian translation. (Source)

October 28, 2003

Meme or Phenomenon?

I just visited Navneet's blog and the first post there is about a this site:Webdesign Practices. Now, I keep running into this site everywhere. This must be the fifth time in the past few days.

Interestingly, Heidi Adkisson - author of the above site - recently published an article on De-facto Web Standards at Boxes & Arrows which comes precisely a month and a half after I linked to her work on Christina Wodtke's blog. Christina, as you may know is founder, Boxes & Arrows.

Not sure if there's a connection here. Just a little curious.

This is something that I discovered today. I made that post as Christina couldn’t find a link to this poster that I knew was Adkisson’s. I found that a trifle surprising since she had written about it before. Now, three days ago, while poring over the pictures from the last IA summit in preparation to a submission for poster to the next year's conference, I stumbled across this image in which Adkisson can be seen silently watching Christina concentrating intently on the poster "Identifying De-facto Standards in Web Navigation".

Is this coincidence or are there mysterious invisible forces at work?!! Well, I think there's a simpler explanation. Unlike HCI, User Experience and Information Architecture are much newer areas. Far from being established disciplines, these are emerging practices with only a few years of accumulated knowledge. So, it's no surprise that someone interested in all these topics comes across the same news and the same people.

Not really so mysterious after all but still very interesting.

Oh, and in his post Navneet also linked to a collection of interaction design patterns on Welie.com, a site run by Martijn van Welie . I knew about this site before but what's more interesting is that only a few days ago Dr. Gerrit van der Veer - who presented at the IESUP workshops - told me that Martijn, a Phd student, is involved in one of his projects at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.

Talk of the Small World Phenomenon or perhaps more interestingly, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. And since I've been spending too much time with a bunch of academics lately, I'd say that's a damn good lead for research into our complex behaviour that we casually term as web surfing.